IT Managed Services Provider Resource Recommendation Update on 2022-10-25

Tutorial

Easy way to send emails using Microsoft Graph API (Office 365) with PowerShell explains how you can deal with Microsoft’s disabling of basic auth with the help of Mailozaurr. Explains, “The only difference between using Standard SMTP and SMTP with Basic auth is renaming Send-MailMessage to Send-EmailMessage, adding a Graph switch, and changing SMTP Server, SMTP port to Graph API application, which unfortunately requires some effort. But it’s no longer necessary to play with what Microsoft offers as an alternative.”

Practical Networking YouTube Channel shares clear, thorough video tutorials that explain complex topics in the networking field. Content is in-depth, but does not go so far down the rabbit hole that you get lost in details that aren’t relevant to practical issues. Recommends their NAT playlist, “if you’re looking for content to truly understand Network Address Translation.”

Training Resource

Technical Writer Style Guide Examples is a curated collection of technical style guides, which can serve as a good starting point for choosing a guide that works for you. Adds, “IMO quality of documentation is highly predicated on it being written in a consistent manner, and following a style guide will help with this attribute. Which one is right for you to learn… that is really personal preference.”

VIM Adventures is an educational game that teaches you all the VIM keyboard shortcuts in a more-fun-than-usual way… and who couldn’t use a little more fun on their mission to gain useful skills?

The Microsoft Learn Cloud Skills Challenge offers the opportunity to earn a free Microsoft Certification exam by completing whichever challenge you choose among the 7 provided areas. Explains, “By completing one challenge… eligible individuals are entitled to one free Microsoft Certification exam… starts October 12, 2022 at 4:00 PM UTC (16:00) and ends on November 9, 2022 at 4:00 PM UTC (16:00).”

Free Tool

Microsoft Lens takes pictures of whiteboards and physical documents and makes them readable. It trims, enhances and converts into PDF, Word, PowerPoint and Excel files. Digitizes printed or handwritten text so you can save to OneNote,  OneDrive or your local device. You can even import images that are already on your device using Gallery. Describes it simply: “pic to PDF/doc.”

AdminDroid is a robust, user-friendly reporting platform with easy setup. The free edition doesn’t restrict reporting functionalities and includes more than 100 reports plus several dashboards. Explains, “The free tier has a pretty amazing number of great reports, analytics, etc and is presented very cleanly. You can search the reports as well.”

The Silver Searcher is an ack-style code searching tool, but with an order of magnitude speed gain over ack. With its focus on speed, it ignores file patterns from your .gitignore and .hgignore, the command name is 33% shorter and all keys are on the home row.

Locate32 allows you to find files and directories extremely fast by indexing all the file names on your hard drives, and then using the resulting databases in searches. Explains, it’s “[t]he Windows version of updatedb and locate commands from Linux. I’ve never needed the contents indexed, just the name.”

Reconnoitre is an open-source SNMP tool that collects multithreaded information and service enumeration. Sees it as “a robust security solution… It builds directories for IT structures that store results from various sources. It automates collecting information using suggested commands and directory structures.”

iSH Shell brings the functionality of a Linux-like shell to those using iOS. Allows you to edit files with sed and cat, move them and more. A “quasi ‘normal’ Linux CLI, with all the tools,”

OpenTelemetry allows you to instrument, generate, collect and export telemetry metrics, logs and traces so you can analyze software performance and behavior. This open-source observability framework can export data to a variety of back-ends and offers vendor-neutral APIs, software development kits (SDKs) and other tools for collecting data from cloud-native applications and their supporting infrastructure.

Espanso is an open-source text-substitution tool designed to save you some unnecessary keystrokes. Explains, “For those not on Windows that want to take advantage of text expanders/substitution software, try Espanso. It is available on most platforms.”

TidyTabs brings tabbed browsing to all of your Windows programs. Integrates closely with the OS so the multi-tab functionality seems to be a core part of Windows.

Fast WinDirStat is a fork of WinDirStat that offers dramatic speed improvements for NTFS drives. Reads the master file table of NTFS partitions to scan information about all stored files, for a potential speed improvement of a factor of 40-50 on normal hard disks and a factor of 3-10 on SSDs. Explains, “Unlike WizTree, this one is FLOSS, and like WizTree, uses the MFT. :)”

Beeftext is an open-source text substitution/expansion tool for Windows that saves you the trouble of repeatedly typing the same text strings over and over. Set up all your frequently used text snippets, and you’ll never have to type them out fully again.

Cheatsheet

Awesome-Cheatsheets is a set of cheatsheets for various popular programming languages, frameworks and development tools. Each was created as a single file to include all the essential things you should know when working with that topic.

SharePoint Layouts path URLs: Quick References provides a fantastic set of shortcuts that can save a Sharepoint admin or power user time vs. using the normal navigation. Recommending this “list of all the /_layouts/ URLs for SharePoint.”

The GAM Cheat Sheet lists a summary of commands for G Suite’s domain management tool GAM. Keep it handy for the proper command format and save the time you’d otherwise spend digging through documentation. Says, “If you’re a Google Workspace shop, you can’t go wrong with GAM and its cheat sheet.”

Sysadmin’s Unixersal Translator is a simple, well-organized lookup table for Linux/UNIX/BSD commands that serves as a helpful guide for those working on multiple Unix implementations. Adds, “I work in a place with varied operating systems like hp-ux and 5 different flavors of Linux, Sun solaris and VMS, along with every flavor of Windows server, so I have used the rosetta stone of unix for years.”